"WASHINGTON -- In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting." http://www.miamiherald.com/509/story/1310367.html
Thats fraud by anybody's standards, but with former heads of GS now working for the obama admin., I doubt GS will be prosecuted. They should be forced to shell out all the profits they made off of those "bets".........PLUS punitive damages.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/77791.html McClathy has a series of reports on the story. It is pretty damning stuff. They examined some and stopped examining the loans that they bought. They sold mortgage backed bonds with loans that were bad to pension funds and took out CDSs betting they would go bad. Actually they had bought stuff they KNEW had a high probability of going bad.
Guys, I noticed something. Everytime I read or look into this "crisis" or "system" and read more into how individuals and institutions are screwing the system it builds a feeling of resentment. Well, I don't remember who said it but... "Resentment is drinking the poison and waiting for the other person to die." You have to draw a line to yourself and say "No more." What do you want the public to really know how bad this really is and have a bank run tomorrow and have no markets to trade? Seriously what do you expect to get out of reading this shit? I used to read it and think it would somehow give me an edge or that I would be smarter than the next guy. This kind of shit just brings you down. Resentment is the root of all that wrong with a human being. Karl Denninger has plenty of space left over on his forum for these cut and paste articles.
There is truth in your statement but many of us on this board feel that if the playing field were more level we would have a chance of being significantly more successful. Uncovering the deep corruption and lack of fairness, I suspect makes some people feel a bit better. (May make some people feel a lot worse and may even validate some other people - flyingtiger) I personally try to live within the system and eek out some conservative returns that outdo the index averages over the long haul fully knowing that the system is controlled by forces much more powerful and knowledgeable than I.
Don't worry. When all this is said and done, somebody will pay for it all. It just won't be Goldman Sachs. Just as the Enron crooks bore the brunt of the dot com burst (and they weren't even a tech company), I'm sure those who are unrelated will get nailed for the subprime mess.
I thought the Enron guys bore the brunt of the Enron fraud. Shows how uninformed I am. They only prosecuted them because tech went belly up?